Minecraft 1.14 Snapshot 19W03A

Can you think of anything in this world that's as exciting as the existence of compost? No. You can't. Which is why we've included it in this week's snapshot. You're welcome!

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

CHANGES IN 19W03A

Added the Compost

Added Barrel sounds

Added Grindstone sounds

Added Sweet Berry Bush sounds

Added placement and break sounds for crops and Netherwart

Added sounds for Blast Furnace and Smoker

Changed Campfire model and texture

Fixed bugs

COMPOST

Instead of eating your veggies you can make fertilizer from it!

Crafted with 3 planks and 4 fences.

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the "launch options" tab. Check the box saying "Enable snapshots" and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the "Play" button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the "launch options" page).

So what does compost do? Any info on that yet? I'm sure it'll help grow crops faster but i don't really see the use of that.Sure, you can save a few minutes of farming but is that really worth a brand new block?

There's not really a whole lot else they can do. I'm not saying they couldn't do _anything_ but multi-threading tends not to perform as well if you can't break up your problem into strictly independent subproblems. That is, the more "things" have to interact, the less benefit you get from multi-threading as the overhead tends to go up at best O(nlogn) and often closer to O(n^2) with the number of interacting components.

For example, if you run mine carts on one thread and blocks on another, what happens when you break the track just as the mine cart goes over it? In a synchronous system, the server just processes one and then the other -- if it processes the cart first then it goes over the track before its broken and continues on down the path. If it processes the track break first then the cart falls off and stops on the (now trackless) block.) If you're doing that in a multi-threaded environment though, you get fun situations like the cart's graphic has moved but its hitbox hasn't so it visually appears to still be rolling down the track while in reality its sitting right in front of you. The only real way to handle that situation is by forcing those two interacting pieces of code to run in order, but that means each piece of code needs to know that the other one is about to cause it problems, and one of the two has to stop and wait for the other one. That requires communication between the threads and that communication is a form of overhead that itself can hurt performance. Obviously that's a bit of a contrived example and the real details are a lot more complicated and technical (real threads have to deal with this on the level of individual variables/memory locations rather than game objects generally though of course game objects are themselves variables in memory..) but it gives you an idea of how things can go wrong.

And even if you sort out the interaction problem, you still have introduced timing issues. For most of the game that wouldn't matter, but there's a lot of redstone contraptions out there that rely on things like the north/south rule. All of those would immediately break if they multi-threaded block and/or redstone updates. Not that Mojang has really shied away from breaking peoples' redstone contraptions in the past but its at least a consideration.

It's highly debatable whether one pile of slower-"burning," "wood" is prettier than another.. that said, I wonder which is more complementary (the previous one was) to Hay Bales (as beneath, for making "Smoke Signals" as opposed to "Campfire Smoke," only)... in appearance. Speaking-of.

Would be kind of "cool" - just saying - if there was more than 1 "Campire" Texture available to make. It's likely to be a relatively highly-used "Block" (see 6 kinds of Wood, on this..? even 2 would be 2X 1).